Workers at retail sales facilities such as large department stores typically perform different tasks related to inventory management and stocking. One such task revolves around zoning product-displaying shelves on the sales floor of the retail sales facility to move the products that remain on the shelves (after the consumers purchase some of the products) toward the front end of the shelves so that the products are most visible and accessible to the consumers. For example, if multiple units of a product are taken off a front end of the shelf by the consumers and purchased, the products that remain on the shelf would be located at the rear end of the shelf and not as visible to subsequent consumers. Accordingly, zoning of shelves at a retail sales facility by moving remaining products toward the front end of the shelves improves product visibility and facilitates the sales of more products.
One disadvantage of conventional product management systems is that they do not indicate which shelves on the sales floor of the retail sales facilities need zoning, requiring workers at the retail sales facility to walk around the sales floor to visually monitor all of the shelves on the sales floor, and to zone the shelves, when appropriate. Given that a sales floor of a given retail sales facility may have thousands of shelves and hundreds of thousands of products, finding shelves that need to be zoned is a very time consuming task and requires substantial worker time resources, increasing operational costs for retail sales facilities.
Elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common, well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. Certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. The terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.